BABii // Interview

Setting foot in BABii’s sonic world feels at once like being in a shimmering dream-state and an ominous, nightmarish realm. There’s a sweetness and serenity that’s intertwined with bristling, spectral entities that glide throughout her creations. “It’s because it’s just a representation of myself, I guess,” BABii – aka Daisy Warne – muses on the balance innate to her sound.

“I’ve got quite a childlike voice and I still look like a baby and all these kinds of things,” she quips, “and I guess I’ve been through some stuff as well but it’s covered up by a façade of sweetness and cute childlikeness. That’s generally who I am so that’s come out in the way I do things. I also quite like the juxtaposition. I couldn’t make just a dark song if I tried, it’s not me.”

“It’s fun to play with sound design to make something feel physically easy or hard to get through, be really floaty or spiky.”

There’s a particular, transcendental physicality to the soundscapes Warne crafts, as if adventuring through a vibrant, fantastical flora that, across the tracks on HiiDE, oscillates between floating through moments of ethereal delicacy and wading through a certain saccharine, yet thorny, viscosity. “I’ve kind of always been drawn to otherworldly things,” Warne expresses, “I just set up fictional environments in my head to make things around. I did a remix recently where I decided I wanted it to sound like a sword fight in a pub,” she details gleefully. “I like trying to figure out situations that probably won’t happen in real life and using that as my point of reference for making something.”

Talking further about this vivid, textured quality to BABii’s compositions, Warne considers, “I guess it’s the thing of me using fictional environments in my head, but sometimes it can be quite abstract. It’s fun to play with sound design to make something feel physically easy or hard to get through, be really floaty or spiky. I think texture’s really important to me actually,” she affirms. “I do think about it a lot and when I listen to other people’s music, I think ‘ah this song’s quite round’, or ‘this song’s quite spiky’,” Warne adds laughingly.

“With music, it just slips out of my brain, it’s so natural it’s like a bodily thing that happens.”

Given that Warne’s music contains such a kaleidoscopic, visual essence, it makes sense that film and TV inform her creations quite heavily; “I think, because I like stories rather than just sound, that maybe pours into my music a little bit and I feel like films are more of an influence on me than music,” she explains. And with a background in graphic design, and with her other creative projects, including making costumes for Iglooghost, it feels natural that BABii’s sound creates such an immensely tangible space for the listener to crawl into.

“It’s a case of going into a flow-state, I guess, while I’m doing music,” Warne tells of the inherently-organic transcendentalism we hear. “It’s why I enjoy doing it so much; ‘cause it’s meditative. And anytime I’m making anything else it’s super conscious, whereas, with music, it just slips out of my brain. It’s so natural, it’s like a bodily thing that happens.”

“I’ve kind of always been drawn to otherworldly things…”

Having written the tracks on her debut album without “the intention, from the beginning, of it being a thing,” Warne expresses how exciting it feels to finally be getting HiiDE out into the world. Contemplating her relationship with the tracks on the album now, she says, “it was definitely cathartic when I made them. It’s all about stuff that happened a really long time ago. Sometimes I get little waves of how the song and the subject made me feel.

It’s sort of like therapy, but also you repeat the story so many times that it becomes like a different thing, detached from your body. Like this old memory that hurt me and I’ve taken it out of my body and it’s flown away from me, but I play it sometimes,” she details. “It’s kind of nice as well, because I was really sad when I made this album and was going through a lot of stuff, but I feel much happier now and it makes me feel good that I’ve come through the other side,” she concludes – with a disarming calmness and composure.